by John Harris
‘Yes.’
‘What about, Sir Captain?’
Hannay gestured wearily. ‘You. Me. Lots of things. The mountain, for instance.’
‘Can’t something be done about the mountain, Sir Captain?’
‘Yes, but nobody’ll do it. It wants someone to have a look at it. There are plenty of people who could, but nobody’ll ask ’em.’
He fished in his pocket and slipped a thousand-lire note to Cristoforo. ‘Here,’ he said gruffly. ‘Go and buy yourself something.’ He glanced up at Amarea and seemed to be sniffing the air. ‘And if anything should ‘appen, just you set off for that ship of mine, uncle or no uncle. Double quick.’
‘Double quick?’
‘Fast. Rapido. Mollo rapido. Capisce? Understand?’
‘Si, signore.’ Cristoforo gave Hannay a beaming smile of comprehension. ‘Signor Patch has taught me. Fast as bloody hell.’
Seventeen
Cristoforo thought for a long time about Hannay’s words. He had no feeling of indebtedness to him, for he had no knowledge of what Hannay wished to do for him. All he knew was that Hannay had expressed the need for an investigation of the mountain and his disgust that no one would undertake it. The issue seemed simple enough. Cristoforo begged a lift to San Giorgio and went to the home of Matteo Lipparini, whose father, in addition to working for Forla, kept a tiny peasant farm holding above the village. From Matteo’s mother he begged a hunk of bread and a piece of sausage and, stuffing them into the pockets of his ragged coat, set off towards the mountain top.
If Hannay could show courage and intelligence and because of them become master of a fine ship – in Cristoforo’s eyes the Great Watling Street had grown in bulk and majesty – then so could he. By doing so he might even convince Hannay that he was capable enough to be a sailor without the consent of his uncle, and so start earlier on the ladder that led upwards to a ship of his own.
Matteo had not responded to the suggestion that he should accompany Cristoforo, so the boy advanced alone up the winding path that led to the summit, finally pausing a long way below the crater, tired, thirsty, and oppressed by the silence of the mountain and the increasing conviction that the last craggy slopes might be beyond his strength and skill.
He stood among the fold of dead lava and stared upwards with a sense of loneliness. Above him the column of black smoke drifted slowly upwards into the rain clouds that were beginning to gather, sullen onlookers of his minuteness.
The mountain had a brooding stillness about it that worried him. In the last week or two it had ceased to be his friend and had become a surly, sulking thing, indifferent to his affection for it, vaguely threatening in a way that Cristoforo couldn’t describe, even before the steam that waved gently from the summit had changed to the present thin but steady column of smoke.
Cristoforo had never seen the mountain smoke before, though he knew from what he had heard that smoke in itself was no reason for alarm. Plenty of people older than himself had seen the smoke at various times, had seen it grow to a thick column on which the lights reflected from the sea played in various colours, only to die away eventually and be replaced once more by the wisp of steam.
Below him he could see the sea, like the mountain grey and threatening and with none of its normal friendly colours, and to his right Anapoli Porto, spreading in a cluster of pink and yellow and blue buildings along the coast round the little harbour where the Great Watling Street lay, with Captain Hannay on board.
Momentarily he wished he were down there in the flowered streets among the oleanders and the pots of geraniums where people could reassure him with their movement and sound, where there were voices instead of this incredible silence. Never before had Cristoforo been so conscious of the mountain’s stillness.
To others, perhaps, the mountain had always been silent but to Cristoforo, who was acutely aware of these things, there had been movement and life about him. Now there was nothing. The folds of rocks were empty, the bushes gave only before his own blundering. Even the threatening sky above his head was empty. There was nothing, not even insects, it seemed.
He pressed on a little further, vaguely uneasy but anxious to reach the summit. He had never been so high on the mountain before, had never quite left behind him the scented vetch and juniper bushes and finally the wiry brown grass so that he was among the scorched rocks and cinders and the pockmarks of ancient agonies where the stony lava flows were thick and black and tortured. San Giorgio lay below him, among the silvery groves of olive trees and the sparkle of oranges, a huddle of muddy-looking yellow houses clustered round a shabby campanile. He could see goats and a few dots of chickens and then he saw a black-coated figure move round a house at the upper end of the village where the Lipparinis had their home just below the threadbare little farm of the Givannos. He suddenly wanted to turn round and head down again to the companionship of human beings.
He put his hand out to touch the head of his dog. Masaniello had shown a marked reluctance to snuffle at the holes and indentations that pitted the slopes of cold lava – perhaps because of the absence of wild things, for it was long enough now since they had deserted the mountain for the tracks to be cold – but more likely, he realised, because the dog was also oppressed by the silence and unfriendliness of the mountain top.
As his questing hand failed to find the smooth brown head, it startled Cristoforo to realise that the dog was not alongside him, and he stopped in his tracks and turned. Masaniello was grinning anxiously at him, its tongue hanging out, the muzzle under its chin.
‘’Niello,’ he called. ‘’Niello.’
He whistled softly and the dog’s stern wriggled as it tried anxiously to make up for its disobedience by wagging its tail.
‘’Niello,’ he said again, more sternly, but the dog, although it stood up, still refused to move.
Cristoforo, anxious himself and wanting to expend his anxiety in anger, strode back to the dog and cuffed it. Then he took a piece of string from his pocket and, tying it to the dog’s collar, set off again.
The dog followed him – but reluctantly, and then Cristoforo noticed that, as it hung back, the hair along its spine stood on end, and it eyed its surroundings with marked hostility and suspicion. Cristoforo began to be conscious of a prickling along his own neck, and when the dog finally sat down again and refused to go any farther he was frankly scared.
He glanced up at the mountain, just in time to see a burst of smoke issue from the summit, rather like the puffs that came from Hannay’s lips when he blew smoke rings, then the steady thin stream of black continued as before.
Cristoforo looked round at his dog, unconsciously seeking some excuse to return. Then he became aware of the mountain’s sounds – a steady rumbling, very low-pitched and almost inaudible, that was mixed with a faint hissing sound like a train letting off steam in the distance. He stopped dead, more anxious to turn his back on it than he liked to admit, but he could still see no sign of danger. Only the dog, squatting behind him, its hair bristling, its eyes rolling, indicated that all was far from normal.
Then the mountain gave another puff of smoke and the dog slithered round on its haunches and bolted down the path, burning Cristoforo’s hand as it dragged the string through his fingers. Thirty yards away, it took up its position again and sat waiting for him, its mouth in a grin, its eyes and forehead anxious.
‘Coward,’ Cristoforo said angrily, speaking out aloud to give himself courage. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, ‘’Niello. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’
The dog’s grin widened but it didn’t lift its seat from the ground.
‘Very well,’ Cristoforo said. ‘I’ll go on my own.’
As he set off again, he noticed that there was moisture in the air and as he stared up at the grey-blue clouds that trailed their bellies along Amarea’s crater he laughed.
‘Rain,’ he said to the dog. ‘You’re afraid of rain.’
The rain seemed to fall a little more heavil
y and Cristoforo debated whether he was wise to risk getting wet, but he decided to chance it and pressed on a little farther up the mountain. Then he realised that the spots that fell on his face were warm and stinging.
He put his hand to his cheek to wipe them away and was surprised to find a smear of grey on his finger tips. Then he saw that the backs of his hands and his clothes were spotted by the same grey-brown stain. He stopped dead and slowly passed the fingers of his right hand over the back of his left. To his surprise, the spots ran into a smudge. He stared at it, sniffed at it, even tasted it.
He noticed then that the road and the folds of ground about him were also spotted with the grey, moist substance and that the fine dust that had fallen on the slopes during the previous days was turning to the same colour.
His lips began to move as he started to pray quietly.
‘Gesu mio, misericordia!’
For a moment, he stood, muttering out loud to give himself confidence, then he heard a faint sigh high up in the sky above him among the clouds that pressed the air down into a suffocating closeness. Suddenly the stillness became more intense. It had been silent before but now it seemed that in spite of the high-pitched sigh, the silence had been magnified a thousand times in a way that prickled along his skin.
Ahead of him the mountainside was blurred. The cloud bottoms seemed to have been dragged down in wispy tails that touched the slopes and there was a strong tang of sulphur in the air, the sickly smell that always clung to the clothes of the workers in Forla’s refinery. He felt something brush across his face again and, looking up, saw the sky was full of a dark moisture.
‘Mamma mia!’ The exclamation burst out of him, loud in the silence. ‘Mud! It rains mud!’
Stupefied by the phenomenon, he stared at his hands a little longer, then fear took hold of him and he turned and fled, catching his foot against a rock so that he went sprawling at the feet of his dog. Picking himself up, he set off again, the dog alongside him, running silently and desperately down the slopes towards San Giorgio.
Eighteen
That night a storm of unusual intensity broke out over the island.
The clouds which had been hanging around the tip of Amarea all day seemed to gather companions from nowhere, ugly black galleons anchored to the mountain where the column of smoke, thicker than during the day, mingled with the vapours of the cloud formations. During the evening, the thick black cumulus changed its shape and spread until the sky was covered with flat, oppressive-looking formations that held down the heat and sent the people hurrying through the streets from their work, casting nervous glances up over their shoulders.
The heavy air seemed to beat down until Patch, struggling in the poor light over his Primavera, found himself sweating. Then a door slammed somewhere in a sudden gusty wind and the room was lit by a flash of lightning which was followed by a clap of thunder that rattled the windows. Immediately, the rain began to fall from the angry-looking sky, at first in long slow drops that splashed leisurely against the panes one after the other, and then in a growing downpour of straight glassy splinters that streamed across the window in a steady sheet of water, and bubbled under the ill-fitting frame and down the wall to form a pool on the red tiles of the floor.
The rain seemed to have quietened the normal gaiety of the building and there was no sound about the place beyond the drip of the rain; and the steady tapping of the water seemed somehow linked to the general mood of frustration.
Listening to it, Patch was curiously reminded of the defeat in the eyes of Don Dominico as they had informed him of Don Alessandro’s reaction to their visit. He had not shared Patch’s anger, but had accepted the news with a calm fortitude that didn’t match the hopelessness in his eyes. ‘Don’t be too angry, my son,’ he had said gently. ‘Our church is as plagued with ambitious men as any other organisation.’
At any other time, Patch might have shrugged off Don Alessandro’s indifference, but just now it all seemed bound up with the growing feeling that nobody cared. Once Patch himself had not cared, but the studied indifference of everyone with influence was making him angry and suspicious and he was beginning to care very much.
Gradually, as the evening advanced, the downpour eased off, but there remained a lurid glow under the clouds, and the trickle and gurgle of running water round the dilapidated old building made music with the plop-plop-plop of a leak in the corridor.
The sound of feet outside caught Patch’s attention, then there was a bang at the door and he whirled round as Hannay entered. He was dressed from head to foot in a long glaringly yellow oilskin that was topped by the grey felt hat soaked to blackness by the downpour.
He nodded at Patch without speaking and, removing his hat, shook the water out of it all over the floor.
‘Rain,’ he said.
‘I’ve noticed it.’
Hannay looked angry and Patch thought he was going to start all over again about the mountain, but instead he fished out his pipe and lit it, blowing smoke into the room in angry puffs like some furious dragon as he walked up and down for a while in a sailor’s short promenade before he spoke.
‘I want you to come with me and show me where Cristoforo lives,’ he said at last. ‘I’m going to beat the living daylights out of that bastard who looks after him.’
He was obviously deeply moved and his anger had not the cold, impersonal quality it had had about the mountain, but something stronger that seemed to sear his soul.
‘I’m going to give him one across the jaw,’ he said ferociously, obviously enjoying the prospect. ‘And see how he likes it.’
Patch pushed a drink across to him without speaking and Hannay tossed it back quickly.
‘What’s happened, man?’ Patch said. ‘For God’s sake, calm down.’
‘He’s been beating the kid again,’ Hannay snapped. ‘He’s got weals all round his legs. Just because he went up the mountain. He did it for me, I think. He came on my ship, scared stiff because he’d seen mud dropping out of the sky. God, as if he hadn’t enough on his slate without that. Then when he went home that bastard lit into him, because he went without asking permission. A strap he’d used. You can see the marks of it. He’s so scared he’ll get another he won’t show me where the bastard lives.’
‘I take it you’re talking about Uncle Angelo Devoto?’
‘’Course I am,’ Hannay snapped. ‘Who else?’
‘You might have told me.’
‘Well, you know now, anyway.’ Hannay seemed impatient to get on with the job. ‘Coming?’
Patch poured himself another drink. ‘Yes,’ he said, slowly and deliberately to give Hannay a chance to calm down. ‘I’ll come. I’ll show you where he lives. But only on condition you sort yourself out a bit first. He lives three floors up and in your present mood you’d probably try to throw him out of the window.’
‘No more than he deserves,’ Hannay said, but perceptibly he began to quieten down.
‘And if I might make a suggestion,’ Patch continued, ‘I should forget about beating him up for the present if you’re keen about adopting Cristoforo.’
‘What do you mean?’ Hannay seemed disappointed.
‘Do you want to adopt Cristoforo? ‘
‘Yes.’ Hannay paused before he spoke but, having made his decision, he seemed in no doubt about it.
‘You’ve asked Mabel?’
‘Mabel won’t quarrel with me. Not over this.’
‘Then a smash in the jaw’s not very likely to produce results, is it? Why not keep calm and make an offer for the kid? Knowing Devoto, I wouldn’t guarantee he’ll respond, but you can try.’
Hannay stared at the empty glass in his hand for a while before replying. When he looked up again, he seemed in control of himself. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re right. Let’s go.’
Devoto lived at the bottom of the Via Medina down by the mole. Outside, at the bottom of the steeply sloping street, the grimy children played in the thin rain, instinctively avoi
ding the puddles as they ran. Across the windows the dripping washing that no one had bothered to take in shut out the light above the slimy pavements and slapped against the crooked walls with their cracked plaster and broken brick-work and the strings of indentations where bullets had bitten into them in the street fighting of 1943.
They picked their way through a puddled courtyard full of rubbish and climbed a set of rickety iron steps. Pushing through a doorway, glassed with multi-coloured panes, they groped across a dark landing, and headed up more stairs, stone stairs with barely enough light to see by.
Hannay thundered on the door of Devoto’s apartment, and waited impatiently, his aggressive humanity bristling like the hairs on a dog’s back, determined to affect some business deal that would result in Cristoforo’s removal from the ugly building. He had been itching for days to meet Devoto, anxious to point out the boy’s thinness, his threadbare clothes, his poor shoes, and the fact that only Patch, with his sporadic generosity, had ever seemed to show any interest in his meals.
They were let in by Devoto’s wife, a tired-looking little woman who had once been pretty, with a child in her arms, and Hannay was startled to discover that Cristoforo’s uncle was only ten years older than Cristoforo himself, the youngest of a set of brothers of whom Cristoforo’s father had been the oldest. He was big and handsome, dwarfing Hannay, and in no way abashed by his poverty.
Patch introduced them, then stood back and let Hannay do the talking. He started off with his usual bull-in-a-china-shop rush.
‘You Cristoforo’s uncle?’ he barked in his dreadful Italian.
‘I am, signore.’ The big man with the sly eyes bowed mockingly. ‘Devoto, Angelo, at your service.’
‘I’m wanting to speak to you.’
Devoto grinned. ‘I’ve been expecting you, signore. I understand you would like my Cristoforo to go to England.’
For once, Hannay was startled. He had not expected his mission to be known.